Do
away with the iPhone battery blues. Hereâ€™s a solar powered case for charging
the iPhone.The iPhoneTM TuffCharge case has been developed by Intivation and
Freeplay Energy and allows users to charge their phone in daylight conditions.
The company claims that exposing the case to sunlight for an hour will help add
about 60 minutes of talk time or two hours of music playback. The case is a
sustainable power source that features an extra battery that gives longer
battery life to the phone and a dock connector that charges the battery and the
phone at the same time.

Nothing bugs us more than something distracting our make-up session. Well at that point, donâ€™t we all just wish that the phone should fly and reach our hand immediately?Â But now, we have got a simple solution to our problem. We can see who is calling by just simply glancing at the dial of our watch and act accordingly either accept or reject by pressing a button on our watch.

Motorola finally made an official announcementÂ for the MOTPURE H15 Bluetooth headset last night, exactly two months afterÂ we first revealed it. The tiny headset comes with noise reduction and echo cancellation technology and Moto pegs its talktime at 4.5 hours. Not bad for a product that tiny,Â we say.Â

Got a cellphone with a conked up battery that just won’t work any more? Well, it might be a better idea to buy a new phone that uses the same battery than buying just a new battery! Nope, I’m not sloshed (not yet) on a late Friday evening.Â Allow me to illustrate what I mean.

Take, for instance, Nokia’s entry-level product portfolio. If you have a Nokia phone that uses its BL5C battery that has met its creator, it would make better sense to buy a Nokia 1200 than buying a new BL5C battery. AnÂ original battery costs Rs 720, while a Nokia 1200 retails at Rs 1,250. The phone pack also comes with an original Nokia charger, which if you buy as an individual accessory will cost Rs 420. Now, do the math â€” the new phone will cost you just Rs 110! Instead of buying just the battery, if you buy the Nokia 1200, not only you get the battery for your existing phone (assuming it is better than the Nokia 1200, of which the odds are pretty high) but you also get a backup phone and a second charger that you can keep at your workplace!

What’s more, if you also want a handsfree (wired headset) along with the battery, you can go for Nokia’s 1650, which retails at Rs 1900. A handsfree costs Rs 420 as an accessory. Do the math again and the price of the handset (Nokia 1650) comes out to be just Rs 70! Unbelievable? Believe it!

This reminds me of the classic case of inkjet printers, where the cost of the core printing hardware is usually around 10 percent ofÂ its retail price while the rest is accounted for by the ink cartridges. But unlike a printer, where the consumer usually runs out of cartridges frequently and buys new ones regularly (and hence providing the manufacturer with a steady revenue stream for a long time after the actual product is sold), the same logic does not work for cellphones. We don’t see lot of folks lining up to buy new batteries or chargers, do we?

A handset vendor might blame it on high import duties in India on ‘accessories’ like batteries and chargers, which attractÂ close toÂ 40 percent duties as againstÂ four percent on cellphones but even that does not make sense for the same ‘accessories’ to become dirt cheap when bundled with a cellphone. I strongly feel that cellphone vendors need to bring down the prices of crucial ‘accessories’ like batteries and chargers in order to curb retailing of fake/non-branded stuff that are usually associated with exploding or leaking batteries.

We have been hearing about the possibility of pico projectors getting embedded into cellphones (who knows, next would be a washing machine?) but before that happens, Optoma will launch a pico projector accessory for cellphones. The accessory can project video and voice up to a distance of five feet and as we understand will be compatible with devices that support TV-out feature. It is based on Texas Instruments’ DLP Pico chipset and will be available worldwide sometime later this year.

The newly formed IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd, a joint venture between IFFCO and Bharti Airtel, will launch hand-powered cellphone chargers for rural India. Designed specially for the hinterlands, where people donâ€™t get electricity for days on the trot, these chargers will help to keep their cellphones charged. By cranking the charger for seven to ten minutes, users will be able to charge their cellphones.

â€œWe will introduce these chargers in the next couple of months,â€ said Dr US Awasthi, managing director, IFFCO.